Laravel: Go for Passwordless Authentication

Hey guys,

Authentication topic today 😎

We all know that Laravel ships the default Email & Password authentication for us. The good'ol traditional way.

However, it's 2024 now. By registering using Email & Password, then users have to verify their emails. It's way bad UX and reduces your sign-up rates.

The passwordless is here to save the day 😎

The PROs of using Passwordless Authentication

• Sign-up user flow will be really fast, with fewer inputs (or even 0 inputs) 😎

• The pain of remembering passwords is gone 🥰

• Save storage cuz we don't really store users' passwords (encrypted obviously) in our DB 🥹

• Verify the user's email in 1 go, 2 birds with 1 stone.

Laravel Passwordless Authentication - The Approaches

Social Auth

By utilizing Laravel Socialite, we can provide a quick sign-up/sign-in flow using:

• Google

• GitHub

• (or any awesome platform out there)

After users sign in, Laravel Socialite will give you some basic details: open id, full name, email, and profile picture.

Then simply do an upsert operation and Auth::login($user) to sign your user in 😎

Magic Link via Email

For this, we only need users to input their email and their names, and then we are all good 🌹

For this, you might need to implement your own generated_magic_links table, e.g:

• id

• user_id

• hash

You can create a temporary user with email_verified_at = NULL . Then send out the email using Laravel Mail feature.

On the user's first visit, you touch the email_verified_at , then log them in 🔥

Easy right?

Other ways

• Send SMS (cost more lol)

• Use TOTP (time-based one-time password as temporary password)

Considerations

• To increase the security, we can apply the two-factor authentication method after logging in.

Conclusions

My applications use Passwordless authentication, check out RenderPDF.io as an example 😎.

Using passwordless is really cool and hassle-free. Fewer inputs, a happier life.

Happy coding guys!